What Dick Cheney, Fox News, And Other Torture Apologists Are Missing

The torture apologists appear to be more upset by the disclosure of their brutality than by the brutality itself. And even as the report concluded that “enhanced interrogation” (which is like calling rape “enhanced fornication”) was ineffective and produced nothing of value to our intelligence or military missions, the right continues to blindly defend the practice and falsely claim that it prevented terror attacks and led to the capture of terrorists, including Osama Bin Laden. It did not.

The chief apologist among the torture advocates is, and has always been, former Vice-President Dick Cheney. In responding to the news of the CIA torture report’s release Cheney blasted it as “a terrible report, deeply flawed,” adding “The report’s full of crap.” This coming from the man who said that it was “pretty well confirmed” that the 9/11 terrorists were working with Saddam Hussein; that Iraq had sought uranium from Niger; that aluminum tubes could only be used for nuclear centrifuges; that we would “be greeted as liberators” upon invading Iraq; and who still believes that Hussein was hoarding weapons of mass destruction. None of those assertions were true, which casts a decidedly negative hue on the accuracy, or honesty, of his pronouncements.